Yesterday's class was on "perspective", the ole "do you see the glass half empty or half full" question that is the base of coaching methodology -- helping people "re-frame" perspectives that are not empowering into ones that are. In the end, it is your perspective that determines your experiences in life, not your circumstances.
So what is perspective? Various "classmates" offered the following: Where you are coming from, the lens you look through, your framework, your organizing principles and attitude. Our downloaded pdf says, "It is a way of looking at, or interpreting a particular situation."
Yet again, it comes down to choice. We can choose our perspective, we can choose what an event means to us. Let's say that we can even choose to choose and respond instead of react by "re-framing" our perspective to be an empowering one.
"Homework" involves defining a current perspective that disempowers and shift ot an empowering perspective. In other words, re-frame your perspective.
I'll leave my current personal story to my next class, and give you a past one. I just had an email from an American friend who will be having her first baby very soon in an Italian public hospital, which brought me back a few years....
I spent three nights in a hospital room with three other women, and their extended families during visiting hours. One woman had about ten relatives who had to greet her in shifts to fit them all around her bedside.
A nightmare you might think, and so did I, complete with tears of self commiseration -- all those people interfering in such a personal and intimate experience (ahh yes, I now see the American cultural values of vast personal space and privacy* popping up). But when the relatives left and the babies were in the nursery, we chatted, mainly about the whole gruesome ordeal that we had just been through, the messy, hard, painful, scary and non-romantic part of giving birth. Each of us described every detail in cronological order while the others listened and nodded, actually interested and totally empathetic. By the time the three days were over and I left with my little wrapped up sausage under arm, I was ready to move on. No birth traumas and I didn't even feel the need to talk about it with family (trust me, even if he was there, your husband doesn't really want to know) and friends (who have either removed the experience or don't want to know either). So, in the end, the crowded hospital room turned out to offer a wonderful therapeutic opportunity, one that left me with an "empowering" perspective so that I could provide just the kind of support my younger nine-month pregnant friend needed.
How is that for "re-framing" a negative, discouraging experience into an empowering one.
a domani,
E
* there is no Italian word that encompasses the concept of "privacy" as we see it. Wonder why?
2 comments:
I loved your perspective on this, mainly because my experience was very similar. I LOVED being in a room with two other women, although I could have done without their visitors (and they without mine, I imagine). The rest of the experience I could have done without, but that pretty much seems to be the general consensus among both Italians and Americans.
Time to try again..
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